There are no War and Peace plot spoilers in this blog post
I had always wanted to read it, so I nominated Tolstoy’s epic as the summer selection to the fellow members of my summer book club, which is composed of all teachers (members include Willard English teacher Adam Howells, Frederick County English teacher Joe Wengerd, and my wife, Jackie, who teaches elementary music and reads approximately twice as fast as me). A going concern since 2018, the book club has been a way for us to stay in touch over the summer as well as cover those unread and intimidating classics gathering dust on our bookshelves. I’ve always been jealous that my younger brother got to take an entire class on War and Peace in college. I read Anna Karenina about ten years ago and loved it, but never made the time for Tolstoy’s other famous novel. It was a fact I was reminded of on a pretty regular basis, as I ended up with Johnny’s worn copy of the tome on my bookshelf. It’s a big austere and authoritative book, and every time I glanced over there it needled me that I had not read it.
My nomination was granted. The book club was on board — this summer it was just Adam and me, so it didn’t take too much convincing.
Before we actually started reading the big thing, Adam and I did some research before choosing a translation. Reading a novel outside your mother tongue becomes a three-person experience between you, the author, and the person tasked with explaining what the author is saying. My experience last summer reading Madame Bovary reminded me of how drastically a translator can affect the reading experience. In the case of War and Peace, there are dozens to choose from, the first English translation being written two decades after War and Peace was published in 1867. My brother read the Pever and Volokhonsky version, a relatively recent translation (2007). A few Reddit threads recommended the Anthony Briggs translation for Penguin (2005), citing the flowing, natural prose with a contemporary bent (he doesn’t make you read footnotes for the dialogue conducted in French, and he even uses the f-word a few times).
This endorsement, plus the endorsement of the fine folks at Penguin, was good enough for me. I called BooksaMillion to order a copy. The girl on the phone either was messing with me or couldn’t hear me that well, because she kept getting the title wrong: “So you say it’s called Warr-anty?”
Over the course of the summer I ended up with three copies of the book in my house, not counting the audiobook. Each copy is prefaced with not only an introductory essay, but a description of how the translation was handled. These remarks inevitably include some implied or explicit shots at other translators. Briggs, for example, defends his progressive style of translation, claiming that the field is filled with…
[…] cavaliers and puritans. The cavalier takes some liberties; the puritan is a stickler for exactitude. In the previous translations of War and Peace […] literal fidelity has been given a higher premium than writing naturally in English.
Language changes, without worshipping modernity for its own sake, publishers recognize the need to accommodate new readers by using phrasing more closely attuned to their way of speaking. Infelicities will be edited, such as ‘Andrey spent the evening with a few gay friends’ or ‘he exposed himself on the parade ground’; we cannot read phrases like these without raising an inappropriate smile.
But these reasons are hardly enough on their own to justify a new translation. There is one way in which all the existing versions fall short: from Constance Garnett onwards they have been produced by women of a particular social and cultural background, with some resulting flatness and implausibility in the dialogue, especially that between soldiers, peasants and all the lower order.
Briggs gives examples of the fancified, fussy language with which these translators render the serfs and soldiers. In his translation, the lower class characters have a cockney accent, which is meant to make the characterization more accessible to an English-speaking reader, if not a reader from England. (I guess an American using this tactic might use a southern or hillbilly accent, something that screams low class?)
Pever and Volokhonsky, in their introduction to the novel, have a more restrained take on the responsibility of the translator. Speaking on behalf of the puritans, they write that…
A translator who turns a great original into a patchwork of ready-made ‘contemporary’ phrases, with no regard for its particular tone, rhythm, or character, and claims that that is ‘how Tolstory would have written today in English,’ betrays both English and Tolstoy. Translation is not the transfer of a detachable ‘meaning’ from one language to another, for the simple reason that in literature there is no meaning detachable from the words that express it. Translation is a dialogue between two languages. It occurs in a space between two languages, and most often between two historical moments. Much of the real value of a translation as an art comes from that unique situation. It is not exclusively the language of arrival or the time of the translator and reader that should be privileged. We all know, in the case of War and Peace, that we are reading a nineteenth-century Russian novel. That fact allows the twenty-first century translator a different range of possibilities than may exist for a twenty-first century writer. It allows for the enrichment of the translator’s own language, rather than the imposition of his language on the original.
They go on to cite Briggs and others as unfaithful translators. It’s one of the many unexpected pleasures of reading War and Peace. I could read an entire book about the petty feuds between this very niche group of people.
How was the novel itself? It was good, and apparently it’s not a novel. Tolstoy himself made this claim. Henry James also said it wasn’t a novel but a big ugly pudding. James meant this to be an insult, but I find it to be a pretty apt description. A big dessert pudding like James describes is often ugly and roughly prepared, but it’s comforting thing, made to be enjoyed by all, an unpretentious dessert. The same goes for War and Peace, which was instantly successful upon its publishing and was so engrained in the fabric of Russia that even Stalin (not a big fan of literature) ordered excerpts to be distributed throughout the country during the Nazi invasion of 1941. The ingredients of the novel are humble — they claim it has an 8th grade lexile level, which sounds about right — but what Tolstoy does with this over the course of 1300 pages is quite satisfying. The book’s characters, flawed as they are, grow throughout the novel and overcome their obstacles in large part by drawing on the values of their mother country.
The biggest thing going for it is that it’s full of people, hundreds of characters, most of whom have real life models drawn from Tolstoy’s life. There is a love for them all that you can sense as you read it, something you rarely get from modern or postmodern fiction. And the characters are not pawns to a didactic end, the way it can feel sometimes with other Victorian novelists like Dickens. As long as the book is, Tolstoy is a master of economy in his description and characterization and plot movement. He is also amazing at capturing timeless, relatable emotions. If someone had told me that one of the protagonists is socially awkward in a painfully relately way, I probably would have read it much sooner. Pierre, one of the three main characters, marks his first appearance in the novel by interrupting a sophisticated party and sticking his foot in his mouth. Later on that evening he parties too hard and commits a prank with his friends that involves an angry cop and a tame bear. His screw-ups, insecurity, and emotional journey make a great audience surrogate as he careens amongst a lot of posh well-mannered 19th century aristocrats, including his icy friend Prince Andrey.
The biggest hurdle for the reader, as with most Victorian fiction, is keeping track of the characters, who Tolstoy introduces rapidly over the first hundred or so pages. In that first chapter I just mentioned, the characters chat in French, which most editions, even Tolstoy’s original version in Russian, force you to read via footnotes (not my buddy Briggs, though!). If you make it through that, you’re hooked, and you can read the book in 200-page spurts easily. For my jogging purposes I would sometimes listen to the audiobook (10 installments of over 60 hours), which is read by David Case, who possesses the haughtiest sounding British accent ever recorded.
I was surprised that it is a work of historical fiction, not just dealing with critical events in European history, but populated with several notable figures of the Napoleonic Wars, including the little Frenchman himself. Tolstoy’s distaste for Napoleon goes a little overboard, and it’s apparently a product of a philosophical debate about great men and free will that Tolstoy was fighting at the time with fellow novelists Dostoyevsky and Turgeniv. Because of this debate there are chapters of straight philosophy. These parts are as boring and repetitive as you may have heard, but there’s not a lot of it. When it appeared I always gave it a careful skim read and moved forward to the characters.
Tolstoy indeed loves his characters of all social ranks, but I wouldn’t call it a progressive book, because it’s not. Characters who treat the serfs with respect or try to improve their lot in life must learn the hard lesson about how the slave-like serfs are in fact much better left to their servile existence. Female characters are rendered carefully but generally in an unflattering manner, with most of the main female characters requiring the assistance of stronger men to extract them from their predicaments. This in spite of the otherworldly assistance Tolstoy’s wife provided him in the creation of his work. In this area the novel falls short.
But I’m happy to have read it, finally, and I would recommend it to anyone. (I can’t say the same about the BBC miniseries they put out a few years ago, which is terrible, sorry.) It’s the best book club read so far, and there are even some speeches that I may pull for later use this year in AP Lang. Best of all, when I get asked by students what I did this summer, I get to say I read War and Peace. And they will be duly impressed and shook.
Or they will say: “Warranty? What’s that?”